If you know anything about blog promotion, you’re likely to have heard about the benefits of guest posting. When done correctly, guest posting is one of the easiest ways to get a blog noticed. Unfortunately however, when done incorrectly, it’s a very easy way to waste your time.
If you want to get published on the best blogs, there are a number of things that you need to get right. The best blogs receive hundreds of guest post proposals and standing out is not easy. Here are eight simple tips for writing guest posts and getting them published on the kind of blogs that can send you some serious traffic.
Check for Rules and Guidelines
Before writing anything, establish whether or not the blog that you are targeting has any rules or guidelines regarding guest post submission. If there are any rules and you fail to read them, chances are you are going to break them. This step takes less than a minute but surprisingly it’s something that many potential guest bloggers don’t bother to do.
Avoid Recently Discussed Topics
The easiest way to guarantee rejection is to submit a post on a topic that has recently been covered. It doesn’t matter how good your post is, if you write about something that the blogger wrote about last week, he/she is never going to publish it. After all, why would they? Before writing anything, always make sure that the topic has not been covered in recent months.
Write About Something Interesting
Take the time to come up with a topic that you believe the target blogs readers will actually enjoy reading about. This might sound simple but many potential guest bloggers rush into topic selection. Don’t underestimate just how easy it is to get published if you write a post that is genuinely interesting and different. A little bit of controversy never hurt anyone either.
Provide Killer Content
If you want to get published on low quality blogs, you can get away with offering low quality guest posts. But if you want to target the big boys, you need to provide top notch content. Many bloggers like to keep their best posts to themselves. Though I can certainly see the logic behind doing so, such bloggers never get a chance to guest post on the best blogs. Decide how serious you are about getting published and take the time to write accordingly.
Know Who You’re Writing For
Before writing anything, ask yourself who you are going to be writing for. If you want your post to get accepted, it needs to be written with the target blogs readers in mind. If the blog is targeted at beginners, don’t write a post that is overly complex. If the blog is targeted at women, don’t write a post from a male perspective. Your post will only be accepted if the blog owner genuinely believes that his/her readers are going to enjoy reading it.
Don’t Forget to Proofread
Proofreading is essential when it comes to successful guest post proposals. Very few blog owners are going to accept a post that’s riddled with spelling and grammatical errors. Accepting guest posts is supposed to save the blog owner some time and effort. This doesn’t happen if they need to spend half an hour editing your work. Your guest post should arrive ready to publish with little to no editing.
Formatting
Big blocks of text are incredibly unattractive. If you don’t format your guest posts properly, they’re unlikely to even get read, let alone accepted. Limit your paragraphs to around six lines each. Use sub headings and bullet points where appropriate. Professional formatting isn’t difficult and it doesn’t take long but that doesn’t mean that it cannot make the difference between acceptance and rejection.
Final Touches
Finally, an easy way to maximize the chances of your post being accepted is to make publishing it a one click job. As a blogger, you should know all the final touches that need to be performed before a post is ready to be published. You should submit your posts with all such final touches already completed.
- Target a relevant keyword and get the density right.
- Include textual links to other articles on the target blog.
- Find at least one high quality, relevant image.
Images Use:
- License: Creative Commons image source & image source
John Smith is a London based online marketing genius and an avid blogger who writes for seopositive limited.
